I went hunting for Forrest Fenn’s treasure in Yellowstone National Park and you should do it too! It was an absolutely amazing and breathtaking experience – my only regret is it took me 40 years to get here!

TL;DRI went hunting for Forrest Fenn’s treasure in Yellowstone Park and you should too – it was an absolutely amazing and breathtaking experience. My only regret is that it took me almost 40 years to get out there – oh – and don’t worry, we didn’t find any treasure… yet. If you do one thing in this blog post, make sure to read our lessons learned – especially if you’re planning on searching for Fenn’s treasure.

You went what?!@

Yes, I went treasure hunting.

Even though I’d like to think of myself as fairly calculating, I think most people would consider me impulsive. When I first heard about Fenn’s poem back in 2012, I jotted it down on my “someday” to-do list, and vowed that one day, I’d have to make a go of it. After all, who wouldn’t want to participate in a real-life Goonies adventure!

Welp, as fate would have it, that someday was about a month ago.

What exactly is Forrest Fenn’s Treasure?

In 2010, an eccentric, millionaire art dealer named Forrest Fenn buried a treasure worth millions in the Rocky Mountains north of Santa Fe. He included clues to the treasure’s location in a poem contained within his 2010 memoir, “The Thrill of the Chase” (which we purchased). Over the years, Forrest has given hints about the treasure through various media outlets. It’s been estimated that over a hundred thousand “Fennatics” have gone searching. In addition, the chase has been attributed to at least four deaths since its beginning.

How do you plan for a treasure hunt?

Well, the very first thing I did was convince other people to go with me because Sara wasn’t letting me go into bear country alone. Luckily, two of my childhood friends volunteered to accompany me on this hunt (and they didn’t even need any coaxing!).

Since this was going to be primarily an exploration expedition, and I was a bit preoccupied moving to Tokyo, we didn’t plan as much as I would have liked. We had a few two in-person planning sessions which consisted of meeting at Zippys for a few hours to brainstorm where the treasure could be. We also created an online chat so that we could collaborate when we weren’t meeting in person. The chat was used fairly regularly to post links from the Interwebs, potential solves, questions, and what not. Not to mention, it preserves history! (Protip: If you do just one thing from this blog, I’d highly recommend doing this.)

Not to mention, the Internet is littered with resources that we used to help us along:

I want to say that I tried not to look at other people’s solves because I didn’t want to have too much confirmation bias, but the temptation is too great, and it’s pretty much inevitable that you’ll get trapped in a k-hole reading where other people have been. In any case, we all agreed that the treasure should probably be somewhere near Yellowstone National Park – so that’s where we headed!

Our Itinerary

Day 1

We arrived in Bozemon, Montana from Seattle, Washington at around 1 in the afternoon. The three things on our actual agenda for the day were the following:

Picking up our rental car so we could drive down to our Island Park AirBnb

Stop by the Costco outside of Bozemon so we could pick up food for the week

Stop by somewhere to get bear spray, a whistle, and a map of Yellowstone

After picking up our rental car and (rental) bear spray cans (don’t buy new ones if you’re only temporarily visiting!), we headed down to Costco to pick up luncheon meat, snacks, water, and other goodies for our week near Yellowstone. Since the nearest grocery store would be 20-30 minutes away, we wanted to make sure our AirBnb was decently stocked. The drive from Bozemon took a few hours – we arrived at the AirBnb around 6 pm and proceeded to just relax and unpack – after all, we had a long week ahead of us.

Protip: If you can afford it and are staying west of Yellowstone, I’d highly suggest eating dinners in the town of West Yellowstone. For one, if you’re really seeking out treasure, it’s going to be a long day – you’re not going to want to cook dinner after a long day of hiking, hunting, and driving. Second, there are a lot of different restaurants that have exotic meats – bison, elk, etc. and it’s nice to support a town built on tourism.

Costco run!

AirBnb

AirBnb

Bear bell

Rental bear spray

Day 2

Prior to arriving at Yellowstone, we wanted to make sure that we at least saw all the big tourist attractions since we didn’t know when we’d be back. We drove the southern portion of the Great Loop and saw:

Protip: The geyser is called Old Faithful because it’s one of a few geysers that park rangers can predict. Intervals between eruptions range from 60-110 minutes and they normally last between 1.5-5 minutes long. Sit on the boardwalk for an up-close view or walk up the side of the mountain for a far-away view with a lot less people – I did both – or if you’re uber lazy, just take a peek at their livestream. XD

You’ll see a lot of this.

Fountain Paint Pots

Old Faithful up-close

Old Faithful from afar

Lower Falls of Yellowstone Grand Canyon

Blinking bison sign!

Day 3

Today was the first day (and ironically, our only day) attempting a potential solve. We ended up going to a place called Boulder Spring off of the Ojo Caliente. It was absolutely beautiful and while there wasn’t a single person in sight, there was a lot of roaming bison. We searched for a few hours, but alas, Fenn’s treasure was nowhere to be seen. If you’d like to see why we thought Boulder Spring was a potential solve, feel free to leave a remark in the comments!

After taking a small break, we decided to check out one more place before calling it a day.

Protip: If you’re hunting for Fenn’s treasure, prior to searching – set appropriate time limits of how long you want to search within an area as well as how you plan to fan out the search. Since we didn’t plan this, we sort of meandered around the solve for a few hours until we were all tired. Based on what Forrest has said, we believed that we should be able to see the “blaze” and the treasure immediately – but this may not be the case, so you’ll want to plan accordingly. Also, Grand Prismatic Spring is a must see!

Planning our solve

Ojo Caliente

Lots of Bison!

Nobody around and no treasure!

Boulder Spring

Grand Prismatic Spring

More Grand Prismatic

And Grand Prismatic again.

It’s beautiful out here!

Day 4

We were planning on saving another solve for our last day so that we could do a little more research (bad planning on our part) – so instead, we decided to drive the northern portion of the Great Loop and saw the following:

Protip: I think you could spend a lot longer than we spent at Mammoth Springs and even stay for a few days in the area. Although we walked the entire springs, it’s quite a sight to see – I didn’t realize it then, but the contrast in the landscape is pretty amazing. We ate dinner at a small cafe called Mountain Mama’s Cafe. I would definitely recommend it if you’d like to try a bit more exotic meats like bison, elk, pheasant, etc. You can pick up Huckleberry ice cream sandwiches at the grocery store across the street!

Petrified Wood

Mammoth Springs

Mammoth Springs

Mammoth Springs

Sheepeater’s Cliff

Bison pot pie

Bison hot dog

I thought this was only a flavor in Strawberry Shortcake.

Day 5

Our last day!

We were planning to attempt another potential solve, but the weather was absolutely terrible and someone in our party felt ill so we decided to just grab lunch in town and pack for our trip back to Bozemon. Since I now live in Tokyo, anytime I’m in the states I really have a jonesin’ for Mexican food because it’s virtually impossible to get in Japan. We decided to eat at Las Palmitas – a Mexican restaurant in a bus! It was really tasty – definitely recommended. Before heading back to the AirBnb, we stopped by Lake Hebgen for a short bit. I got to walk around and explore the area by myself, but I must admit that it was really creepy with all these “Grizzly Bears frequent this area” signage.

Mexican restaurant in a bus!

Inside Las Palmitas

I won’t lie, this had me pooping my pants.

Early afternoon at Lake Hebgen

Lessons Learned

Yellowstone National Park is absolutely beautiful. Forrest once stated that the whole purpose of his endeavor is “to get people off the couch, off the video games.” Well played, Mr. Fenn. It got me to visit my first national park in 40 years of life, and I don’t even live in the country anymore!

It’s been said ad nauseam, but once you get “boots on the ground” (BOTG), everything is much bigger in real life when compared to a computer screen; I don’t care how big your monitor is. Even a small search area could potentially take hours to investigate – depending on how thorough you are – so plan accordingly!

We winged it – we’re 3 dudes born and raised on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. No matter how much research we did before we arrived at Yellowstone, there’s nothing like experiencing it for yourself. I walked around Lake Hebgen by myself early one morning, and I’ll be the first to admit, the silence coupled with all the “Beware of bears” signage had me pooping my pants. There’s nothing that will prepare you for that, so just get out there and explore!

If you can afford it, you should stay as close to Yellowstone as possible – potentially even in the park if you can get an RV camper. We stayed in Island Park at an AirBnb and even though it was awesome – it was about 30 minutes away from the entrance to West Yellowstone – so it was a 60-minute drive every day.

There will be a lot of traffic because of animals near the road and tourists that don’t follow directions. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. So don’t freak out. We spent at least 3 hours one day waiting for bison to move from the side of the road. Coupled with the tourists stopping in the middle of a one-lane road to take pictures, you’re bound to get trapped behind some insane traffic. Make sure you have a lot of podcasts saved on your phone and/or everyone has an offline mobile game. There were times we literally shut our engine off because of the traffic.

At the very least, make sure to create an online chat room (with unlimited history – sorry, no Slack!) to document your potential solves. You’ll thank me when you decide to head back the following year. Not to mention, you’ll want to use an assortment of other online tools (Google Docs, AirTable, etc) to help provide some structure to this process.

The adventure was amazing – amazing enough to do it again. I wish I could say that we found the treasure, but there’s actually a ton of satisfaction in just planning and searching. There’s quite a bit of work involved, and it isn’t something that most people can say – especially those from an island in the middle of the ocean.

In front of Yellowstone sign

So for that, thank you, Mr. Fenn.

Now that we have an idea of what the experience actually entails, follow me next year as we head back in an RV camper!

We’re finally settled in our two-bedroom apartment in Nakano-ku, Tokyo. Here’s a publicly-shared Google calendar that shows our extra bedroom’s availability. If we’ve crossed paths in life and you need a place to stay in Tokyo, please email us. If the room is available, it’s yours!

It’s been an entire month without a post, but don’t worry, we’re still here. We’ve just been extremely busy with our move to Tokyo! If you think moving is really stressful (spoiler: it is), moving to another country where you don’t speak the language is quite… well, quite the experience (spoiler: next level stressful).

It’s by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

One thing that really caught us off-guard is how untrusting (some) Japanese people and companies were with us. Being from Hawaii, I know we’re generally a lot friendlier and trusting than peeps in big cities. However, Sara and I both have a lot going for us career / education-wise so it was a bit frustrating. Not to mention, we’re both ethnically Japanese, and (I think) I qualify as a highly skilled professional (- foreigners Japan is currently trying to attract!). We experienced so many highs/lows (and nuances) moving to Japan that we’ll have to save that rant for another day.

In any case, we finally made it!

We wanted to send a small update to say that we’ve finally settled into a small two bedroom apartment in Nakano-ku! We’re on the south side of the station – so it’s quiet and suburban-like with the madness of Nakano Broadway only a few minutes away. We’re also one stop from Shinjuku and one transfer (three stops) away from Shibuya.

Now to the important part.

If we’ve ever crossed paths in life* and you need a place to stay in Tokyo, please email us!

No guarantees, but if the room is available, we’ll try to get you in.

*Even if we’ve never met, we love to meet new friends.

Here’s a Google calendar that shows the extra room’s availability.

Bonus points to my mother-in-law who will be our first guest in a few weeks! Yay, mom!

p.s. We’d also like to give a big shout-out to Tomo, Misaki, Sheldon/Eri, and Lisa – because without y’all, none of this would have been possible. <3

Follow us, a Japanese couple from Hawaii, as we document our move to Tokyo! Hopefully, through this experience, we’ll learn about our family’s history and what being Japanese is really all about.

For once, I don’t have a TL;DR for this post. The title says it all! We’ve moved to Tokyo!

Wait, what! We’ve finally moved to Tokyo!

Since a lot of people have been asking questions, we created a post to help answer them.

Why are you moving to Tokyo?

We’re not going for family nor work nor <insert your favorite, logical reason here> – I guess one could say we’re moving for adventure. It’s been a dream of ours since we first met more than 8 years ago, and it’s been in the works since we lived in NYC / SF over 3 years ago. Hopefully, through this experience, we’ll both learn a bit about our family’s history and what being Japanese is really about.

What kind of Visa did you get?

I received a boring Spousal Visa. Lucky Me!

On the other hand, Sara received a Long Term Resident Visa via ancestry by proving she’s sansei (thanks grandma!). It was a long process that took a little over 6 months, and we had help from an immigration attorney to help submit our application. Sara’s planning to blog about what she needed to provide and do because there isn’t a ton of information online aside from a post or two in the Japan / Japan Life subreddits.

How long are you staying?

Sara says FOREVER!

(Just kidding, we’ll come back to visit.)

Seriously though, we don’t currently have any plans to return home, but life does come at you fast, so who knows?

What are you going to be doing?

Well, for one, we’re working.

Sara will be working remotely for Colliers International because it’s her first true love job – she’s been with them since she was a rebellious teenager – except for that one time she cheated on them with CBRE in New York. Hehe. For the past few years, I’ve been really interested in helping preserve the past – so to continue on with that journey, I’ll be working on a small storytelling app.

We’re also going to be exploring the city/country and learning a bit of Japanese in the process. My goal is to be able to give people tours of the city for the 2020 Olympics!

Where are you going to live?

For the next few weeks, we’re staying in an AirBnb in West Tokyo. Since neither of us have to go into Central Tokyo for work, we’re planning on finding a place near Tachikawa station to get a bit more space so people can stay with us. Tachikawa is ~30 minute ride to Shinjuku.

Can I stay with you?

No.

Props out to you if you actually read this far, but then you’ll also know that we got a larger place so that people can stay with us. Just hit us up to see if the room is available.

That’s it for now! 🙂

If there’s anything else you’re curious about, let us know in the comments!

Through a retrospective of our family reunion, learn what we would have done differently so you don’t make the same mistakes. Learn what went well and how we plan to improve for the next one! Part 3 of a 3 part series.

Our Family!

In my experience of writing software in a team, one of the most important steps – if not the most important – is the capacity to speak objectively (as a team) about the events that led up to the release of the software.

I like to call this the “the good, the bad, and the ugly“.

While the act itself is important as a team learning experience, I believe that the retrospective is critical because it’s another step towards being able to speak objectively and critically in a team setting – an act that promotes “psychological safety” within a team.

Google the term if you want to learn more about high-performing teams, but having worked on a number of them in my career, I’ve always found that the most functional teams I’ve been on have exhibited characteristics of being “psychologically safe”.

Obviously, this takes both comfort and practice, but after 8 years, Sara and I are more than comfortable enough to be able to speak critically of one another, so I’m sharing what we discussed privately in our retrospective of our family reunion.

The Good

If expected outcomes were our measure of success, we definitely succeeded because we fulfilled them all! Not to mention, quite a few family members thanked us for our efforts – that should be one of the first signs that we did a lot of things right.

People mingled

Took a great family photo

Ended up with a lot of corrections to the family tree

As an added bonus, got email addresses for a large chunk of the family where I’ve been sending updates about this blog to! Hi fam! 😀

For having only a week’s time to prepare for the 50+ person event, the organizing went extremely smoothly. We weren’t cramming the night before and had spread out the tasks over the entire week. I attribute this to Sara’s planning / organizing skills because they’re much, much better than mine. Here’s some protips (from Sara) on how to make an event go smoothly:

Create a timeline of the day’s events and print out hard-copies to distribute to everyone

Put all assets in labeled manila folders to be distributed on the day of the event – the more granular and contextually organized the items, the better.

The print out of the family tree definitely worked out better than we imagined. There were a lot of family members who fixed the tree, but it also acted as an event anchor that encouraged interactions between members of our family. If we were to recommend one item to be reused from our reunion, this would be it.

The Bad

There were a few hiccups on the day of the reunion – for one, the venue actually didn’t have the appropriate seating arrangement (nor was it even possible), so we had to move people around 30 minutes before everyone arrived. I won’t lie – it was a bit hectic because there were only two of us that knew all the details. In critical situations, I tend to wear a manager hat and order people around. Ultimately, I have to remember that it’s family and not a place of business – so I don’t think I handled that as well as I could have – since after all, this is supposed to be a fun gathering – who cares about these minor inconveniences. 😀

Second, while we did have a planning schedule, we misplaced it in the chaos and so we improvised in the moment. As a result, we failed to give detailed instructions to the people at the check-in table. This led to pseudo-random distribution of favors and missed collection of email addresses. Ultimately, this was totally our fault due to the lack of communication. On a good note, we did later remedy the situation by manually walking around the venue and collecting email addresses.

Last, while I tried to stick to the schedule on the sheet that Sara printed out – and I kept reminding myself to, I ended up making up the schedule on the fly. While it worked out this time, in future events, that may not be the case. I really have to get better at sticking to pre-planned schedules. 😀

The Ugly

We have a fairly decent camera, but unfortunately, because of a setting enabled on the camera and the poor lighting in the room, a lot of the pictures came out blurry. This was partly due to the fact that the camera is pretty new, and Sara didn’t have a ton of experience using it. With that said, the group photo of our family was taken by another member so we did end up with a nice photo. We should have taken a few shots the night before and checked them out, but in our haste, we didn’t and ultimately lost a bunch of photos.

What We Would Do Differently

All in all, I think given the circumstances, we planned a great an amazing family reunion, but if we’re never critical of what we’ve done, we’ll never improve. So, here’s a list of items in no particular order of what we would have done differently:

Have more people show up early and be involved in the setup. We should have communicated a setup plan the night before with a small group of people instead of shouldering it ourselves.

Definitely take some photos the night before to see how the camera would perform.

Highlight features of Ancestry.com earlier in the event. We didn’t show all the amazing features of Ancestry until right before the end. There’s a lot of documents that Ancestry has collected that people were interested in such as the census scans, draft cards, yearbook photos, etc. It piqued quite a bit of people’s interest.

I really wanted to print out something physical that everyone in the family could take home. While we are giving out a family photo as a prize for this reunion, one of my dreams is to be able to print out family baseball cards where the back of the card would have trivia about a person’s life. One of these days, I tell you…

We helped organize a successful family reunion, so can you! Learn how we focused on seating charts, interactions, and collaboration. Download the tools and design materials we used. Part 2 of a 3 part series.

Our Guess Who!

Update: If you’re planning on throwing your own family reunion, make sure to check out:

Part 3 – Family reunion retrospective aka what we would have done differently

If you read my last post, you’d know that Sara and I were fortunate enough to have been included in the planning stages of a family reunion. And… if you know me, you’d know that this has something I’d been secretly wanting to do for a number of years.

I can’t really put my finger on why I’ve been so fascinated with learning about my family history, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve cared less about lives being led on Instagram and more about my family’s history in Hawaii.

To gauge success, I viewed the most important outcome of the reunion as the following:

Family members should interact and meet one another – no matter their lineage. This was most important. If this happened at some level, even if none of the other outcomes occurred, we would have had a successful reunion.

To accomplish this, we focused on three specific facets of the event:

Seating

Interactions

Collaboration

*Note: We’re making all the assets we used in planning this event available in this blog post. Unfortunately, to use them, you’ll need a bit of an Excel background and someone with Adobe InDesign experience. If you’re planning your next reunion and want a custom design for some of these assets, I hear that for a small fee, Sara might be able to help you out. 😀

Seating

Nametags

Check-in sheet

I know how most local family parties end up, and I really wanted to encourage people to meet different members of the family. To help solve the issue of familiarity, we arranged the seating chart so that families would not sit next to their immediate family, but keeping at least one parent and child together as well as spouses if their children were grown adults.

If we made people feel uncomfortable, then I knew we were headed in the right direction.

If you’ve ever tried to seat a large group, it’s fairly painful without the use of technology, so I made a quick spreadsheet on Google Docs to dynamically show available seats as the seating chart is filled out. (I knew my finance background would be of use someday!) Feel free to customize it to your own liking as I’ve filled it with a bunch of random celebrities. In addition, since there were a ton of people who had never met, we also made name tags for everyone – you’ll find the InDesign templates available at the end of this blog post.

Note: The seating chart is titled “Guest List / Seating Chart“. If you notice, I have the floor plan of the event space where I’ve numbered each seat at a table. We didn’t need this level of granularity to actually seat people, but it really helps to visualize who is sitting where. After you’ve seated everyone, the “Sign-In Sheet” tab dynamically pulls from the seating chart. You’ll want to sort this sheet by “Last Name” (since families arrive together) and print out the result (or copy it to an InDesign template like we did) to use at the sign-in desk.

Interactions

Once everyone has been seated in an uncomfortable spot, we needed people to interact with one another. I’m generally not a fan of forced interactions, but we decided to include two items on the table that would help “kickstart” the conversation.

Conversation Starter

The first item would be a conversation starter, commonly known as an “ice-breaker”. Each conversation starter would be placed at everyone’s seat and have two sections. In the first section, you have to say how you’re related to either my grandmother or one of her sisters.

When thinking about familial relationships (especially when dealing with 2nd / 3rd cousins), it’s always good to have people form a visual baseline of where you are in the family tree.

The second section of the conversation starter would contain questions to ask the table to help keep the flow of the conversation going. Since I’ve been fascinated with recording my own family history, I had a database of almost a thousand questions to pull from. Examples of these questions include:

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?

Who is one person here you’d like to learn more about?

What was something you got away with as a child that your family still doesn’t know about?

Guess Who?

Our Guess Who!

1-4

5-8

Numbers

People

People

The second item would be a “Guess Who” game that would be situated as the centerpiece of every table. Once everyone stated where they were in the family, we had pictures of 8 people numbered one through eight. On the table, we had cutouts of those numbers, along with the names of the eight people in the photos and a few extra members of the family to increase difficulty. The idea was for the table to interact (and collaborate) with one another to match the photo to the person. During the reunion, I announced the answers and let the winning table know they would receive a physical copy of the group photo we’d take later in the day.

Collaboration

Since we focused on micro-interactions occurring on the table, I wanted to ensure that the room had something larger to collaborate on at the macro level. Sara and I paid for a subscription to Ancestry.com via a Black Friday deal, and we’ve both spent countless hours attempting to fill in our family’s history. I met with my Aunty Gerry on a Saturday to complete a large chunk of my grandmother’s tree, but we were still missing quite a bit of people / details. The original idea was to show the family tree on a projector, then have people come up and fix the tree on the laptop, but we didn’t think that interaction would go well because of the inherent technology barriers (re: people crowding around a single laptop, using Ancestry’s user-interface, etc).

Instead, Sara painstakingly transcribed the tree from Ancestry.com (which doesn’t have great export options) over to Adobe InDesign where we could then print out a large 8 foot banner of the tree (which costs ~50 dollars). We then had post-it notes for people to fill in corrections. Here’s the before and after of the tree.

Before

After

As you can see, I think out of all the interactive ideas we had, this was definitely the best one. There were so many family members who came up to fix the tree and add more detailed information! The display became a focal point of the event – where people could get out of their seat (woohoo!), make their corrections, and ultimately talk to other people in the family.

*Note: We used colored post-its to represent gender to make it easier when we placed the corrections back into Ancestry.com

Assets

So to sum it up, here are the assets that we’ve made available to help you plan your next reunion!

With a week’s notice, we helped organize a family reunion. Sharing our tips so you can too! Learn how we organized seating arrangements and used games to encourage interactions between families. Download the tools and design materials we used. Part 1 of a 3 part series.

Our family tree with corrections!

Update: If you’re planning on throwing your own family reunion, check out:

Part 2 – Download all the tools and design materials we used in our reunion!

Part 3 – Family reunion retrospective aka what we would have done differently

Whether it’s obsessing over Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History or interviewing my parents to learn more about their childhood, I’ve always been fascinated with the past.

Luckily for me, one of my grandmother’s sisters, my “Aunty Jean” as we call her, was visiting Hawaii with her extended family – most of whom I had never met. This meant that my Aunty Gerry would be responsible for organizing a casual family get-together.

If your family is large and anything like mine, this usually consists of a meal at Zippy’s where families sit next to their immediate family and talk story / catch up with those they’re familiar with. I mean, I should know since I’m definitely guilty of this myself.

After all, we’re human. We tend to gravitate towards familiarity.

Yet, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that this setup isn’t ideal since we don’t get to learn about other family members aside from at a “surface level”. There isn’t much depth to the relationship, and sadly enough, we end up knowing more about our friends than our own blood. Don’t get me wrong – some families may be better off this way, but I’d like to think that my family should know (and want to know) more about one another.

I wanted to do something different.

With about a week’s notice, Sara and I helped my Aunty Gerry organize the reunion. Even though we have quite a bit of experience organizing large community and corporate events, there’s an inherent pressure in dealing with family. No matter the size, you always want it to reflect the best of your abilities because ultimately, it’s a reflection of your parents.

When thinking about what a successful outcome would be, I came up with the following three outcomes that would ultimately shape the day’s activities:

Family members should interact and meet one another – no matter their lineage. This was our main goal. If this happened at some level, even if none of the other outcomes occurred, we would have had a successful reunion.

Take a family photo that every family should receive.

Enable corrections to the family tree that my Aunty Gerry and I have spent hours constructing.

All in all, the reunion turned out better than even I could have imagined!

Not only did we accomplish all three outcomes, but as a bonus, we received email contacts for family members whom I had never even met prior to the reunion! Big props to my wife, Sara, for doing a large chunk of the design work including the design of the game, the program, and the family tree above.

Over the next two blog posts, I’ll be posting the documents and visual assets we used to plan and organize the events of the day – so that you too can plan your own family reunion! I’ll also be detailing how the day unfolded and things we could improve upon for the next reunion.

Stay tuned for the next post where I discuss what goes into planning a reunion when given a week’s notice!

Make sure to continue reading:

Part 2 – Download all the tools and design materials we used in our reunion.

Part 3 – Find out what we would improve on if we could “do it all over again”